Blasphemy and Other Ancestors is comprised of four novellas, in which authors Padgett Powell, Darius James, Lee Henderson, and Jean Marc Ah-Sen explore the tag end of existence and the abasements that memory holds in store for characters living "outside of their time."

In Blasphemy and Other Ancestors, a Southern man of letters tries to instruct his assistant on the matters of the heart, a self-centered telephile recounts how his aunt taught him about the world beyond his T.V. set, an avant-garde filmmaker is haunted by a Nazi persecutor at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, and a sundowner discovers that a writer recording the events of his life holds the secret to his ability to remember his past lives.

Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the author of Grand Menteur and In the Beggarly Style of Imitation. His writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Catapult, The Comics Journal, Maclean's, Hazlitt, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and The Toronto Star. The National Post has hailed his writing as "an inventive escape from the conventional."

Jean Marc Ah-Sen's profile page

Lee Henderson is the award-winning author of The Broken Record Technique and The Man Game. His writing appears in the PEN Canada anthology Finding the Words and the speculative fiction anthology Darwin’s Bastards. For a decade he has written about contemporary Canadian artists for Border Crossings magazine. He has exhibited artwork in Vancouver, Toronto, and elsewhere, and curated shows of contemporary art and experimental music, including the inaugural selection for Hamish Hamilton Canada’s online gallery, The Looking Glass. He has led workshops for UBC and the Summer Literary Seminar and mentored at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and he currently teaches creative writing at the University of Victoria. His new novel, The Road Narrows As You Go, will be published by Hamish Hamilton in September 2014.

Lee Henderson's profile page

Darius James (aka Dr. Snakeskin, born 1954) is an African-American author and performance artist. He is the author of That's Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadasssss 'Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury), an unorthodox, semi-autobiographical history of the blaxploitation film genre, and Negrophobia: An Urban Parable, a satirical novel written in screenplay form.His work is influenced by the Voodoo religion. James lives in Hamden, Connecticut.

James Darius' profile page

Padgett Powell is the author of six novels, three story collections, and one non-fiction book. He has retired from a long career of schoolmarming which was necessary to pay for things to live.

Padgett Powell's profile page